Instances

[stormlord]

Unfortunately having a good list of places to go in your head in case they're camped is one of the things old EQ had. I myself like hte fact it wasn't instanced. I also like to bump into people while adventuring. However, I know what it's like to be frustrated when you can't find a spot. Sometimes in EQ you'd spend 2 hours trying to get a good group together and an ok spot and sometimes the group would break up before you found something. Some people remember it badly.

I don't understand why the frustration has priority over meeting other players while playing. I guess that sums up my thoughts. I know it's frustrating, but is it so frustrating you're willing to let go of contact with other players while dungeon crawling? It seems a lot of players, past and present, would rather not bump into other players in exchange for reduced frustration. For me, the frustration was always an acceptable side effect, given the restrictions inherent.

Personally, I think the server was better when the population was lower. You still occasionally couldn't find spots and had to reroute, but it wasn't as bad. Just imagine how much worse it was on live. We routinely had 1500+ players online at once. I remember looking at the server screen and seeing as much, early on. Of course, as expansions were added there were more and more places to go and players were more spread out--one of hte reasons POK books were added.

I feel for a modern game to not have instances it'd need to either have more places for people to kill, with some more ready access to fast travel (or porting), and/or possibly some of them randomly created, and/or maybe dynamically increase/decrease the difficulty of the content based on the population in hte area. Doing that, the game could preserve spontaneous contact with others players while reducing the frequency of frustration in contested content.

But what gets me is how many players expect almost everything to be instanced, by default. I don't understand that. They just don't care at all for having random contact with others. Many of htem do have a close circle of friends. It seems once htye get in their guild they just close the doors behind them and disappear. I'm not saying they're not good friends to their in-group, but they're very picky about the people they will deal with. Too picky, IMHO.

That's another thing: PUGs. I loved PUGs. PUG's gave me some of my best moments in EQ. If you restrict yoruself to just your guild or your close friends, you miss out on so much flavour and information out there.